Andrew & Eden Kötting

Andrew and Eden Kötting have been collaborating for as long as they can remember. Father-daughter, a conjoined entity, manufacturing their art in a remote Pyrenean farmhouse or a light industrial unit in St Leonards-on-Sea.

Andrew, a free spirit, pagan and pantheist, argues against bigotry and fundamentalism by way of written interventions in the purity of the paintings he makes with Eden. And Eden obliges with quirk and charm, boldly brazen in her mark-making; assured and eloquent, despite her neurodiversity and physical disability.  

Clive Scott in an essay on Sebald’s Photographic Annotations’ makes a distinction between captions and ekphrasis. The caption is always a form of propaganda, telling us how to read what we see.‘Ekphrasis makes text coincident with the perception of the image (not pre or post), intensifying the assimilability of the photograph’s past….’

And so it is with Eden’s paintings, her works, which are also Andrew’s, as he sketches through her hands and eyes, sometimes directing and sometimes being directed. And as his words are her words, so are her sounds and shapes, even if she doesn’t forge the rhetoric or share an intense interest in the theology. We are left to ponder, who is ventriloquizing who?

That both of them can find inspiration in zones or images identified by Andrew is the glue that holds them together, whether it be the moving image works, the sound pieces, the sculptures or their fraught performances and VR installations.

Eden makes innocent of it all, makes light, embroiders her serial borders with winking flowers or tell-tale heads. They are magical, free-floating, Micro-comic.

‘So we invent things to do, to keep us both sane, the work is our therapy and complacency’ Andrew says ‘and thus we blunder on….’